How to take advantage of free people searches in your next outreach campaign

To say that the link building landscape has turned on its head over the last few years would be a gross understatement. Once regarded as something of a free-for-all marketplace, where the biggest budgets won the biggest links (and ultimately, the best rankings), this isn’t necessarily the case now.

Instead, white hat marketing has gained a lot of traction. Companies are much more wary of alternative methods, even if the rewards can be significantly quicker.

At the same time, developing a white hat outreach campaign isn’t the easiest thing in the world. It’s in these cases where you have to deal with “real” people, ultimately appealing to their better nature in a bid to get your link featured.

Bearing this in mind, we will now take a look at some sources around free people searches which can help you find these influencers more easily, and get your content piece into the right hands.

Social media

By far and away the easiest source of influencers comes courtesy of social media. The beauty about this is that already a lot of the work is done for you. For example, in the case of Twitter, you can quickly see the type of subjects someone promotes, as well as seeing how many followers they have. The F-word is particularly important here; it shows you what reach your coverage is going to have. Suffice to say, the higher this number, the better your results are going to be.

The best way to approach this method is to start interacting with their tweets on the platform. From then on, you can progress to sending a direct message, before eventually promoting your own content with them.

Existing coverage

The next point is all about finding journalists who have already covered topics similar to the one you have produced. As they have already shown an interest in these, it’s a good indication that they are going to want to press ahead and feature something else along similar lines.

Simply searching Google, or a newspaper’s website directly, is sufficient here. It’s at this point that you should be handed a list of articles on the subject, and the author of these pieces.

It should go without saying that your next course of action is to initiate contact with these journalists. They tend to be slightly busier than social media influencers, so there can be occasions where you can get away with a direct message asking them to showcase your content immediately.

Conferences

The final option we are going to talk about is completely offline, but it can work very well. As we all know, “offline” relationships are a little more personal and ultimately, the results can be slightly better. If you do find yourself at a conference, which is frequented by influencers, make it your aim to get to know them. Don’t shove the content straight in their face, you need to get to know them for a few months before that happens. However, once you have done this, don’t be afraid to gradually start to push some of your own creations to their inbox to gauge their reaction.